


Whole

by corvidkohai



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: M/M, Zack Fair Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:34:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23816242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corvidkohai/pseuds/corvidkohai
Summary: Cloud struggles to remember Zack, and always finds the memories slipping through his fingers. Until, eventually, he doesn't have to worry about remembering, because you can't forget what's right in front of you.
Relationships: Zack Fair/Cloud Strife
Comments: 24
Kudos: 392





	Whole

**Author's Note:**

> for landakguling!

Zack was, for all intents and purposes, a ghost to him. He remembered the man the way you remember a dream three weeks later—in fits and starts, with big gaps in important places. He knew the story of what happened to them, the facts of the events. He knew the way his heart swelled in a very important way any time he thought of the man. But there was a person shaped gap in his memory where Zack ought to go.

Before, he hadn’t been able to remember Zack because he’d been wearing his memory like a suit. He had been blinded by it, staring at something he was so close to that it blurred. But all that time wearing his memory had scrambled what was left of the memory itself, like he had stretched it out of shape by putting it on himself.

He could remember bits and pieces of Zack, but never had the full image. There were times where the memories got so close he could almost reach them, but they always slipped away again, behind some wall where he couldn’t reach them. Every now and then, something would trigger it, and he’d almost have a piece of Zack back for just a breath before it ran through his fingers like water.

It caught him off guard every time. It was rarely the same thing twice, but this one was consistent.

Like the ex-SOLDIER he was not, he was very particular about his sword upkeep. Cleaning it and oiling it, checking it for nicks and sharpening each individual piece of First Tsurugi had long since become a daily ritual. Some people read the paper at the breakfast table when they first got up. Cloud spread his sword across the floor of his bedroom with a cup of coffee that inevitably went cold by the time he got to it, too busy with his sword to drink it. He drank the coffee cold anyway, unwilling to let it go to waste; there were too many distant memories of hard Nibel winters where everything was scarce to tolerate the thought.

Eventually, try as he might, he couldn’t stretch the dregs of his container of sword oil any further, and it had to be replaced. He’d been at his usual store, looking over the shelves for his usual brand, when someone came up beside him.

“They finally started stocking the old brand,” the man said to Cloud.

He looked up, uncomprehending. The man looked back down at him, blinking quietly. He seemed content to let them be in a stand-off, and normally Cloud would just ignore what he said and move on, but he was caught, now, in the man’s eyes.

He had SOLDIER eyes.

They were the same aqua color as every other mako enhanced person’s. His leaned more toward blue than green, the way Cloud’s did. The glow he never saw on anyone other than himself anymore turned his eyelashes a faint blue.

The ex-SOLDIER nodded toward the shelf.

“It’s been hard to find, the old standard issue SOLDIER sword oil. I’m guessing you’re as nit-picky about your sword upkeep as the rest of us?”

“… You could say that,” Cloud muttered.

The man reached out and picked up a container of a different brand that Cloud didn’t recognize and held it out.

“It’s nice to get back to old reliable, you know? That stuff made all the difference with our blades back in the day, and I think they’re making it the same. Can’t tell you how glad I was to get my sword back in the same shape it was in the old days.”

“… Right.”

There were no “old days” for Cloud, and it never stung more than when he heard ex-SOLDIERs reminisce. Most of the time, he was perfectly aware that SOLDIER was a cesspool, rotten to its core and toxic for anyone who stayed a part too long. Cloud couldn’t remember any SOLDIERs other than Sephiroth and the scraps he had of Zack, but those were enough to prove to him that being a SOLDIER usually made for a bad end. This handful that survived liked to come up to him, thinking him a comrade in arms, and Cloud never knew what to say to them. The best he could do was try to just hurry along the conversation so he could slip away and try to never see them again.

“What kind of sword did you have? I don’t remember seeing you around,” the man started, and that was enough for Cloud. They always tried to strike up conversation, and that was the one thing he couldn’t allow. There’d be uncomfortable questions, if he let this drag on, about how he was enhanced if he’d never been a SOLDIER. He didn’t owe it to these strangers to rehash old trauma, and if he didn’t want to do that, he had to make a quick escape.

“Thanks for the recommendation.”

Cloud turned and left in a clear dismissal, though his enhanced hearing meant he easily picked up the ex-SOLDIER mumbling, “Did I say something wrong?” as he walked away.

Cloud made his purchase and returned to Seventh Heaven, eager to put the whole thing behind him.

The next morning he sat on his floor, like usual, with his cup of coffee and First Tsurugi disassembled and spread out around him. He took up his usual rag and opened the container of sword oil, and it hit him like a brick between the eyes.

It was overwhelming. It was _Zack_. He got flashes, barely there hints of times he’d been crushed to the man’s chest in a hug, the way he’d been pulled into a headlock, the hand in ruffling his hair that brought the distinct smell of _Zack_ with it, and left some lingering.

His chest ached sharply. It was reminiscent of Zack, but it wasn’t quite _right_. It was missing something. Cloud coughed and sniffed, trying to deny the way his eyes were watering, as he began working the oil into his blades. He tried to distract himself by remembering what the other smells that made up the Zack he remembered were.

Citrus, like Cloud always found in soaps made in Gongaga? Cinnamon or chocolate, like the baked goods he distantly remembered them sharing? Sandalwood, maybe, like the Wutaian colognes so many SOLDIERs and troopers had brought back with them. He thought he remembered smoke, and a part of him wondered if that was the taint of Nibelheim left on his memory, until he remembered that Zack had smoked cigarettes, and he was sure it must have lingered on his clothes and fingers. There was probably leather, from the gloves that every SOLDIER wore.

There was an endless list of possibilities, and every time he came up with one, he wondered if maybe that wasn’t it, if maybe he’d found the right combination, but nothing was ever quite right.

And that was unfair. Because he could remember the smell of Sephiroth just fine, burned into his nostrils and his brain from Nibelheim and appearance thereafter. This same sword oil, rose, vanilla, leather, and smoke. The last, he was certain, _was_ from the events at Nibelheim. It had been scrawled onto his mind in permanent ink during that fight, when he’d been so close to his once-idol. Every hallucination he’d ever had came with the smell, and somehow, the transformed bodies of clones possessed carried it with them. Somehow, smoke had always been a part of it, and it was always wood-smoke, never cigarettes.

It wasn’t right. It was cruel, that even now, the second he thought of it, he could remember how Sephiroth smelled with aching clarity. But Zack’s scent was forever out of reach. There was a blockage there, some wall between him and the memory he wanted to reach, his mind trying to protect him from himself. He knew, he _knew_ it would be like cutting out his lungs to have the memory of Zack whole in his mind, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care that every time he threw himself against that wall, he came away with a splitting headache that reminded him of every time with AVALANCHE that he had curled in on himself, one hand to his temple.

His headache, by the time he set aside the sword oil, was blinding. He wondered if he shouldn’t go back and exchange the oil for a lesser brand, just to spare himself this process every morning. But he knew he wouldn’t. It was a scrap of Zack he could keep, something tangible to hold onto, and he was too desperate for something to cling to—he couldn’t just get rid of it.

He wasn’t sure he’d ever have the strength to.

Cloud had known before the rumors reached him. There were whispers, now, about the strange illness that seemed to be spreading without any hint of how it was passed along. Of the mottled skin that was its calling card, of the strange black liquid that oozed from the bruise-like patches. People talked about how it didn’t respond to any treatment—no potions or antidotes, no Cures or Esunas. Even the best medicine the WRO had to offer didn’t help. People were concerned. People were afraid. People wouldn’t talk about it in a voice louder than a hushed whisper.

Cloud didn’t need to hear the whispers to know about the illness. Not when he had it himself.

And that was an issue, for many reasons. Not the least of which was that, while he had never made the cut, he was built like a SOLDIER. And SOLDIERs didn’t get sick. Whatever this illness, this infection was, it wasn’t working like any other disease that Cloud had ever heard of. Even with the talk of super-bugs, mutated viruses that were devastating and could affect anyone, Cloud had never even heard of an ex-SOLDIER catching ill. It just didn’t happen.

It was alarming, that it was happening now.

Still, it didn’t bother Cloud much at first. The malaise left behind now that he was a soldier without a cause meant that he didn’t much care what happened to him anymore. If he was ill, that was fine. If he died from it eventually, the way others were starting to, then at least he wouldn’t have to be miserable all the time.

He wouldn’t have to live his never-ending life, missing a man he couldn’t remember the way he’d miss his still-beating heart if it was cut out of his chest. If he died, he could be _with_ Zack, and that idea made the whole situation more palatable than it would have been otherwise. He wouldn’t be struggling to remember someone whose memory his mind was trying to protect him from. Zack would just be _there_ , and there’d be no person-shaped hole in his mind or in his heart.

The thought made him, arguably, a little too okay with the situation.

Still, there were precautions to take, for the sake of his chosen family. He took to wearing a black cloth that covered the ever-growing patches of black on his arm, and if Tifa looked at it oddly when he first started, she also didn’t ask. He moved into the church in the ruins of Midgar to keep the risk of him infecting anyone else to a minimum. And besides, he slept better on the ground than in a bed, after all these years of travel anyway.

He still visited Seventh Heaven. He thought that if he stopped altogether, Tifa would stop letting his behavior slide, and then he’d really be in for it. He couldn’t give her motivation to sit him down and set him straight, because he knew that she’d talk him into coming home. His common sense said that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea, returning to Seventh Heaven, but the rest of him screamed that, if he could do nothing else, it was his duty to protect Denzel, Marlene, and Tifa from himself, from what he carried with him. This, at least, he could still do for them.

He didn’t give Tifa enough reason to give him a talking to, and part of that was appeasing her when he could. Sometimes that meant staying late when the bar was closed to help wash dishes and sweep the floor. Sometimes it meant reading the kids a bedtime story while Tifa did her bookkeeping. Most of the time, it meant doing supply runs for the bar.

The menu at Seventh Heaven was always rotating, so Cloud’s list of groceries was always different. Tifa ordered all her alcohol from a separate seller, so he didn’t need to pick up that stock, but she wanted her ingredients to be as fresh as possible. That meant the local grocer, and meant Cloud running to get them.

Her list had been short this time, and Cloud was able to carry everything in his arms to the cashier. As he waited in line, like everyone else, he let his eyes pass over the items on display near the register. His eyes lingered on the cigarettes, and he got a familiar ache inside his ribs, the one that throbbed to the rhythm of Zack’s name.

His breath hitched, but he forced it to even out. He let his eyes pass over the packages, the different types and different brands. He could picture a pack in Zack’s hand, could imagine him tapping out a cigarette from the box, but the packaging kept changing. As his eyes flitted over the shelves, the pack in his mind’s eye kept changing. Which one had Zack had? Was the package red, or green, or blue? Maybe gold?

It seemed important to Cloud that he remember. It was something steady about Zack, something that never changed. He knew that the brand had always been the same, had some half-remembered joke Zack had once made about never changing on the tip of his tongue, something about brand loyalty. He got flashes of cigarettes tucked behind an ear, dangling from lips, held between gloved fingers that lazily flicked off ash from the still-burning end.

This was a way to keep Zack close, if he could only remember. He knew the scent lingered on his clothes and on his skin, and it would feel like coming home, to smell that again. He didn’t want to blow his gil buying a pack of every option of every brand—there were too many, and it just wasn’t practical. He wanted to say he was on the verge of remembering, but he wasn’t even close. He couldn’t even remember the color of the packaging. Had Zack hand-rolled his own and just stored them in an old box? Were they menthols, or maybe flavored?

“Excuse me, sir? Are you ready?”

Cloud’s eyes cut over to the cashier. He cleared his throat and put his items down to be rung up.

“Yeah, sorry.”

As the cashier worked, Cloud let his eyes drift up to the cigarettes again. After a long moment, when the cashier read off his total, he refocused on paying.

He gave it up as a lost cause. Maybe someday he’d remember, and he could bring this piece of Zack home with him. Just not today.

All his precaution of living in the church. Wasted.

When Tifa had hesitantly told him that Denzel had caught Geostigma, Cloud’s guilt had come crashing down around his ears. This was the last thing he wanted. He was _responsible_ for Denzel, in a way he wasn’t with Marlene. It was him Denzel looked to for a father. He knew he was a poor excuse for one, but this illness was not one of the things Cloud wanted to pass on to him. What he was supposed to give were the sword lessons Tifa swore were a bad idea, but that had Denzel lighting up like he was fluorescent whenever he overheard someone mentioning them. Not an illness with no cure.

Cloud put more distance between himself and Seventh Heaven. He could see Denzel’s heart in his eyes whenever he did come by, so excited to see him and so upset that he’d been gone so long. Half the time, he didn’t even know Cloud was there; he was too busy sleeping, as his body fought to stave off the infection. Seeing him all but bedridden had been worse for Cloud’s guilt, even as he took turn after turn sitting with him and changing the cloth on his forehead. Cloud wasn’t in a state like this. Cloud was almost completely fine, save the rare twinge of pain. He understood that it was a difference of age and enhancement, two things out of his control, but he felt the guilt nonetheless. He was the one who had brought this into their home. He should be the one suffering, not Denzel.

But, like everything important always seemed to be, that, too, was out of his control.

Denzel was always insisting that he was fine, trying to climb his way out of bed on legs that shook. Cloud had to push him gently by the shoulder back into bed sometimes, when he just wouldn’t listen to reason. Once he’d needed to pick him up bodily and settle him back into bed with firm promises that he wasn’t going anywhere.

It reminded him of himself, when he was younger (and, okay, maybe he still had the same tendencies). Insisting that he was fine when he clearly was not, determined to soldier on through anything that came. Going to daily training after sleepless nights. Going on missions when injured. Trying to go to class while sick with the flu. He’d done it all, and it had frustrated Zack to no end. Sometimes, Cloud thought that half the reason Zack had kept him so close was to keep an eye on him, just to make sure he wasn’t endangering himself out of sheer hard-headedness.

He could catch glimpses in his memory of Zack sitting at his bedside, in the barracks, in the infirmary. He vaguely remembered Zack telling him stories, and he only remembered that much because he remembered insisting to Zack that he wasn’t a child and that he didn’t need bedtime stories. He could hear the ghost of familiar laughter, even if he couldn’t quite flesh it out in detail. He remembered a smile, but it came and went so quickly that he couldn’t see the details, didn’t know if it was broad or lopsided or shit-eating, only that it was wide enough to show teeth.

As he watched Denzel sleep, checking on his bandage every now and then, he tried to remember what, exactly, Zack had done when Cloud had been laid up. He was certain that the man had been better at comforting someone than Cloud had ever been. He could use a few tips and pointers, if he was going to be of much use to Denzel, beyond keeping him in bed. Half the time, when Denzel was awake, they sat in silence. The other half, Denzel was the one trying to do the talking, while Cloud hesitantly told him to save his energy.

He wanted to know how to be comforting. How to help. How to ease Denzel’s suffering, even just a little, even if it was just with a laugh. He thought that, maybe, if he could just channel Zack, he’d be able to handle this a little better, with a little more care.

That, in the end, was what got Cloud to drop the thought, with a gut-instinct flinch away in distaste.

He couldn’t wrap himself in Zack’s memory again. He didn’t dare. Not only was it insulting to his memory, to use him like a prop, like a crutch—he was afraid it would cost him what he did remember of his friend. He was on such thin ice already, his hands full of scraps of memory that slipped through his fingers like they were strands of silk. He had forgotten Zack entirely, when he had worn his memory. If he put it back on, who knew if he’d ever get out of it again. Who knew, when he was brought back to himself, _if_ he was brought back to himself, if there would be any of Zack’s memory left to recover.

He couldn’t risk losing what little he had left.

He put aside any memories of Zack at his bedside, refusing to look too closely at them. If he did, he might sink inside them, and he didn’t want to know what would be on the other side.

He was determined to help find a cure for the Geostigma now—not for himself, but for Denzel. It meant giving up on his dream of reuniting with Zack, but that dream wasn’t worth the reality of potentially losing Denzel as well, if things continued on unchecked.

He tried doing an endless amount of research, going to libraries both public and private, owned by the WRO or the scraps of Shinra’s legacy. But he had no experience with medicine, and little with biology. He had read the case files of what had been done to him and Zack, even the actual records of what had been done to Sephiroth, but the piecemeal picture they painted did little for him. The bits he could actually understand were things he already knew. The intricacies of J-cells and S-cells and their effects was locked behind a wall of technical jargon that went over his head, plain and simple.

Put a screwdriver and a wrench in his hand, and he understood science. Give him scientific documents and he was as lost as anyone else. He had a head for engineering, but he didn’t know the technical terms for half the things he did anyway. He learned through experience, not papers. He didn’t have much hope for helping to find a cure, not really, and that was a bitter pill to swallow.

It was particularly bitter because he knew there was only one option for how he could help, if it wasn’t through research. When it had first crossed his mind, it had sent him into a spiraling panic attack that had ended with him vomiting into the flowers in the church.

All he could do to help was offer himself up as a lab rat—something he had sworn he would never be again.

The doctors told him he was a “clinical test participant,” but all he could hear was Hojo calling him “Subject C.” He was constantly turning his eyes away from their lab-coats and gritting his teeth so he wouldn’t lash out when poked with a needle. He swallowed pills and had to fight down memories of when capsules had been pushed past his teeth before. These labs had the same smell as the old ones, antiseptic and recycled air. It brought all his least favorite nightmares to the surface again. He preferred the ones where he was Sephiroth’s puppet to the ones where he was Hojo’s, and that said something.

He was glad he was sleeping at the church, where at least he wouldn’t disturb anyone when he woke up screaming.

He had to explain to Tifa what he was doing, in the end. She kept pressing for what he was doing all day when he said he was “busy,” when she knew he didn’t have any deliveries. He couldn’t bring himself to lie to her face, so he had told the truth. He still wasn’t sure if it was worth it, to watch her face fall and twist into pity. He hated pity more than anything else, even and especially because the situation _was_ pitiable. He’d had to look away from her, turning to look at photos on the wall, to tug on his gloves, anything to avoid eye contact as he explained himself. He told her that the testing facility (he refused to acknowledge it as a lab aloud) wasn’t that bad, that the doctors were kind, that they appreciated his help.

If she seemed to know what he wasn’t saying, that the lab-coats and needles and the too-white-too-clean space haunted him—well, she didn’t call him on it.

The only upside about it all was that Zack’s memory seemed to hang closer, when he was in the labs. Like his ghost was pulling itself to Cloud’s side to help him through familiar territory. He could imagine Zack’s laugh a little clearer, could almost hear the soothing note his voice hit when he had tried to comfort Cloud while they had been locked in their cell. He could imagine what he would say, the reassurances and promises and colorful curses toward the scientists, even if he couldn’t quite hear the words in his voice.

And, somehow, that hurt worse. Zack was so close, so close their fingertips were nearly brushing, but he couldn’t quite reach him. There was a veil between them, and just because it was made of velvet now instead of concrete didn’t mean that it wasn’t there. To have Zack so close but still not able to reach him made Cloud’s heart ache sharply.

But Zack was forever out of reach. Even his memory was too far gone to hold close. And that was never going to change.

Tifa, in a bid to keep him around Seventh Heaven more often, asked for his help running the bar. He could still sneak off with his delivery business as an excuse, but not too often; she knew where his records were, and wasn’t above snooping to make sure he wasn’t running away from her. So he got wrapped into working, usually as a barback, but sometimes as a bartender, if Tifa needed to step away to do something else. When he worked as a barback, he was largely ignored. But sometimes, people tried to chat him up while he was behind the bar.

He was never a fan of it. He never knew what to _say._ When he wasn’t pretending to be Zack, he was too awkward to know how to flirt. And he knew he was supposed to flirt back, that this was just a game some people played. Not everyone was actually looking to get him out of the bar, though he knew some were. Some just liked batting their eyelashes at handsome men. He had tried, at first, to play along, but it never went how he intended. More often than not, he earned a laugh and was told he was “cute” before his flirter immediately backed off.

There was one girl, though, who seemed insistent. Every time he was behind the bar, somehow, she seemed to be there. She was relentless, and no amount of polite rejection deterred her. She reminded him a lot of Jessie, in the way she could take his “no” and just laugh before continuing the pursuit anyway. That thought had ached like a punch to the sternum, and he’d had to try and put it aside very quickly, but had never been able to unsee it.

She had asked him outright, once, if he was single. And he had hesitated. Partially, because it would be easier to say he wasn’t, even if that wasn’t strictly true. Partially because, as much as he wasn’t seeing anyone, his heart still belonged to someone else, and he wondered if maybe he hadn’t been spoken for, once.

His memory of Shinra was shaky as it was. Too much of it had been eaten away by the mako, like old drapes that moths had gotten to.

He remembered how he felt, that much was crystal clear to Cloud. He knew, in his gut, on a marrow-deep, instinctual level, that he had loved Zack with his whole heart. He could remember the flutter in his stomach, the tightness in his chest, the way he was insatiable when it came to being around Zack. He’d had a need for his presence like he had a need for air, and his lungs seemed to burn when he was deprived. In this part of his memory, Zack wasn’t in the foreground. He was the target of the love he remembered so clearly—and it was the _love_ that he remembered, for all that he had forgotten about the man himself.

He lost sleep, some nights, trying to remember if maybe there wasn’t more to it than that. That maybe it hadn’t been one sided, that maybe he’d been loved in return. Maybe he had some stake on Zack as more than a friend and a savior.

He only had glimpses, flashes, and they were more confusing than if he’d had none, and it had been left to his imagination. He knew Zack had embraced him often. He distantly remembered the teasing headlocks and the hair-tousling they had come with. He knew they had rough-housed. But these were all things that could be so innocent, and not at all what he was hoping for. They _could_ mean more, but were not enough to convince him that he had ever been together with Zack in the way he had wanted.

He had one fragment of a memory. It was hazy, and far away, and seemed to slip from him every time he tried to hold it for too long. It had come with the too-sterile stink of the labs, the reek of antiseptic and recycled air. The focus of it, though, was the feeling of lips pressing between his brows. It didn’t take much to guess who, in the labs, would have done such a gesture.

But was it born of trauma, of a need to hold close the one suffering with you, or out of love?

Cloud didn’t know. He didn’t know, and he couldn’t even really guess.

He ended up resenting that woman at the bar, the not-quite-Jessie, for making him think about it so often. He hated recalling the biggest maybe he had, hated the gap in his memory that wouldn’t let him know with any certainty what the truth was.

It made him _really_ never want to work behind the bar.

Fighting Sephiroth again had been the toll, physically and emotionally, that it always was. He did not need to be blindsided by Loz and Yazoo immediately after the fight, and all he really remembered was leaping, his sword above his head, before a blinding light hit him square in the chest.

Then there were two voices, the voices he missed most in his ears. It wasn’t very hard to place Aerith after she had spoken. For all that he struggled to remember any part of Zack, for all that he knew this, too, would slip away as soon as it was over, hearing his voice filled something in his chest that had been vacant in his chest for so long.

Being told that he had no place with them there made the edges of that vacant thing ache, but he was able to put it aside, with some effort, when he woke. It had done something, warmed some freezing part of him, to be able to be the one to heal Denzel himself. It was Aerith’s cure, he would never deny that, but pouring the water over his head made it feel like all those long hours in WRO’s labs weren’t a waste after all. Surrounded in the water by healed children, who seemed to all want to celebrate with _him_ , made him feel strangely alive. It made the constant ache of Zack’s absence hurt a little less than usual.

As he looked around at the children, at his family, he tried to breathe in the moment, to carve it into his memory so he wouldn’t lose this precious point in time the way he had lost Zack.

Until he looked up and saw Aerith crouched down with two children in the aisle.

His breath had caught as he froze.

Aerith stood and began walking away, and drew his attention to the figure lingering in the doorway.

His heart formed a lump in his throat.

_Zack_. In amazing, stunning clarity. Still in the uniform Cloud had known him in, he looked like he had stepped right out of the fog of his memories. If he had been asked earlier, he could not have possibly drawn up a clear visual of what Zack Fair looked like. But, as they locked eyes, he knew this was him the way he knew warmth on his skin was from the sun. He couldn’t tear his eyes away, even as Aerith walked further, even as she turned and spoke to him. He watched the slow, brilliant smile crawl over Zack’s face as they watched each other quietly.

Aerith reached the doorway, where Zack was leaning against the frame. She set a hand on his shoulder, and Zack finally turned to look at her again. It felt like Cloud had been released from some sort of spell, finally free now to look toward Aerith again. The two smiled at each other—wide, familiar grins. Aerith pulled her hand away and Zack caught it, pulling her into a hug. He kissed her cheek and muttered something into her ear that Cloud was too far away to make out, especially over the racket the children were making.

Then Aerith turned and made her way through the doorway with only one final glance back, a hint of old mischief curling at her lips. She disappeared into the white light beyond the door.

Cloud kept waiting for Zack to turn and go with her. He was determined to watch him the whole time, to breathe in as much of his memory as he could get. He stared at Zack as Zack stared at him, his hands propped on his hips now. As the moment stretched and stretched, he watched Zack breathe a laugh and drop his head, shaking it in his exasperated amusement.

And then he did the impossible.

He started walking _toward_ Cloud, instead of away.

Cloud was pretty sure that was when he stopped breathing.

Zack wove in and out around the children in the aisle, and more memories slid into place at the sight. The way he moved—confident and easy, like he knew there was no problem he couldn’t solve. The hint of a familiar smile on his lips, the bright swelling of good cheer in his eyes. He was seeing double, with the present before him but a thousand other scenes printed on the back of his eyes. Zack walking through Shinra Tower, Zack teasing and joking, Zack in the breath before a lack. But it all came back to the whole of it, the completed picture that he’d been fumbling to make out fragments of for so long now, all put together and perfect in front of him.

Zack blatantly ignored AVALANCHE as he made his way through, who were immediately on edge upon seeing him. He saw more than one of them drop a little lower into a battle stance—no one was proud of a Shinra association anymore, and even ex-SOLDIERs would never wear their uniforms in public. Such a display of Shinra approval had the group on edge, with one exception.

Tifa, who knew as well as Cloud did, that they were all seeing a ghost.

Zack slipped down into the pool, and now that he was close enough, Cloud could hear him mumble, “Excuse me,” and “Sorry, can I get by?” to the children in the pool. Their eye contact never broke, though, Zack gently guiding children out of his way with his hands and his words. A strange hush fell over the church as Zack came to stand before Cloud.

“Hey there, handsome,” Zack flirted. “Come here often?”

It was the perfect thing to break the tension. Cloud couldn’t help the breathless laugh that escaped him.

“Yeah, yeah I do. But _you_ don’t. What’s happening, Zack?”

“What’s _happening_ , Cloud,” Zack started, plucking Cloud’s hand from the water and holding it between both of his own, toying with the fingers and tracing patterns over his palm, “is that, this was the end of Sephiroth. There’s no more of Jenova left for him to make his way back with. Your duty as the Planet’s Hero is completed. Gaia and Aerith talked about it, and they figure they owe you a lot, and they don’t like being in debt. They thought that maybe letting me out of time out would be a good repayment.”

Zack paused and looked up at Cloud. Cloud didn’t realize until he saw Zack’s face morph into distress and his breath hitched that he had started crying.

“What if it’s not real?” Cloud whispered. “What if this is in my head? I couldn’t even remember you, Zack. Not really.”

Zack’s face fell, turning somber. His bright eyes almost seemed to glisten, and that was _wrong_. Memories of Zack in tears in the labs came back in a rush and knocked the breath from Cloud’s chest.

“This wasn’t what I meant, when I asked you to be my living legacy. Not all the guilt, and the struggling to remember what you only forgot to protect yourself. All I ever wanted, Cloud, was for you to be alive and happy. If only one of us was gonna make it, I wanted that to be you.”

Cloud sniffed and shook his head, saying, “It was never going to work, Zack. Part of me died on that cliffside with you.”

Zack curved his hand around Cloud’s cheek and gave him a soft smile, one that, even with his returning memory, was largely unfamiliar.

“Well, then you’re getting two things back today. Me, and that part of yourself.”

“It’s been so long, Zack. I don’t know how to be whole anymore.”

Zack dropped his hands to hold Cloud’s, dipping his forehead to press it to his love’s.

“We’ll figure it out. Together.”


End file.
